My first post!!!

After having taken this blog name for almost half a year I've finally put up a post. I'm currently hoping to post a couple of features regularly, including baseball value bets of the day, poker session results (this isn't a bad beat pity blog), and random daily thoughts.

Here are some of my views on baseball and poker so hopefully you can understand where my picks and session results come from.

Baseball: I don't believe in home field advantage during the long baseball season. However, which team is at home has a major impact on the runline 1.5 and the O/U because of the half inning that might go missing. I believe that starting pitchers and streaks are two of the most important things to look at, as baseball is a sport where adjustments take a long time. An example of what I thought was a tremendous value bet over the weekend was Oak@NYY on Sunday, with Dan Haren against Andy Petitte. You were getting +125 on one of the leading Cy Young candidates against a slumping team. Yankees lines are always skewed.

Poker: I play a lot of online poker and one of the things we all hear about is the bad beats. Reasons for a higher frequency of bad beats than one would expect include the larger number of hands that get dealt and the skill of the players being significantly worse than most would find in a live game. They say that the luck evens out in the long run and that if you're +EV when you shove your chips in you'll come out a winner in the long run. However, for bankroll building purposes I don't believe this statement to be entirely true. My feeling is that pot size volatility is a major factor in that equation. For example, let's say you are all in with an overpair 5 times and win 4 of them as expected. If the pot for the one time you get bad beat is larger than the other 4 pots combined, you will still come out a loser. Now, I understand that true poker should be very deep stacked. On the GSN show High Stakes Poker, the amounts at the table range from 100K to 1m, with blinds only at 300/600. But online, it's a push-fest most of the time. So I'm testing a strategy which aims to limit the pot size variance. It's an experiment that I began 2 weeks ago and still interests me as I suffer beat after beat. I keep score of my sessions in terms of buyins and not BBs. Hopefully this will prove to be a profitable experiment in the longrun.

Well, thanks for reading my first post and I'm sure now you understand why this blog is called Ramblings and Gamblings.